One doubtless unintended consequence of the Cold War was the furious intensification
of a tendency to cast competing schools of economic thought as virtual
faiths; quasi-religious dogma battling for the monetary soul of the world
while real religion waned. Notwithstanding the corroding and eventual downfall
of Marxism, the differing sects of liberal capitalism would informally
come to blows on the editorial pages of newspapers and in fixed bouts (pun
intended) known popularly as federal elections. It took the sobering events
of September 11th to remind us of the continued relevance and profound,
historical volatility of real religion.

In the economy wars of the previous half-century, the (Ontario-born but essentially
American) economist John Kenneth Galbraith cut a figure equal parts Savonarola
and Swift. To fiscal conservatives, Libertarians, and the fundamentalist
fringe in places like the John Birch Society, Galbraith was definitely
the former. But it's hard to reconcile their image of him - a mad Keynesian
socialist championing big government and punitive taxation against business
and the market - with the patrician Harvard professor who began his career
in FDR's wartime Wage and Price Control Office.

Reading The Essential Galbraith, a new anthology that surveys his career, one tends to encounter the Swiftian Galbraith, a dry and decidedly unhysterical thinker
armed with reserves of desiccating sarcasm. Occasionally, as in "The Unfinished
Business of the Century", the lecture that closes the book, one finds the
moralist behind the imperturbable facade, the Galbraith responsible for
books like The Culture of Contentment and The Good Society.
This would also be the Galbraith that, alone among the bright young men
sent by Washington to interrogate Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer
before the Nuremberg Trials, regarded the astutely contrite war criminal
with barely concealed disgust. Speer might have miraculously increased
production under withering Allied bombardment, but Galbraith still saw
a man who performed this miracle through ruthless use of slave labour.

This moral Galbraith has been the one best served by the editing of this compilation.
In the early chapters, which draw from the meat of his economic writing,
Galbraith makes a strong case for the inadequacy of poorly-divined market
forces at addressing the basic needs of society. In "The Nature of Social
Balance", from 1958's widely-read The Affluent Society, Galbraith
describes the dilemma of states and municipalities that, unable to underwrite
their own loans and at the mercy of transfer payments from federal authorities
who can, begin starving their citizens of decent public services out of
a morbid, politically-induced fear of taxation. To those familiar with
the abusive tango between Ontario and Toronto for the past half-decade
or so, it's a chilling passage.

Perhaps his greatest gift to modern vocabulary is the term "conventional wisdom",
an idea that Galbraith regards as essential when dealing with economists
and those professing fiscal wisdom. In politics, and even (perhaps especially)
business, where authorities are often poorly apprised of the positions
they regard as gospel, the concept of conventional wisdom is a guiding
light: "An understanding of our economic discourse requires an appreciation
of one of its basic rules: men of high position are allowed, by a special
act of grace, to accommodate their reasoning to the answer they need. Logic
is only required in those of lesser rank."

In his
essays on Adam Smith, Marx and Keynes, Galbraith acknowledges the sad truths
that render economics "the dismal science": the fact of constant change
in social and economic circumstance, the seductiveness of conventional
wisdom, and the difficulty in reading both accurate statistics and the
future clearly. It's perhaps because of this that Galbraith's reputation
is stronger as a historian and popular essayist than as an economist. It
was his caustic but confiding wit - along with some fantastic visuals -
that drove the 1977 t.v. series "The Age of Uncertainty", a PBS/BBC/CBC
co-production that greatly impressed me, even as a twelve-year old boy.

Despite the much-heralded "triumph of the market", there's remarkable choice, but
little depth, in the panoply of books and magazines on business, management,
money, investment and economy today. Alone among Galbraith's younger contemporaries,
Princeton's Paul Krugman offers a broad, skeptical perspective on the world
of money. Yet, in his book Peddling Prosperity, Krugman feels obliged
to point out that Galbraith was never able to author an economic treatise
as influential as Keynes or Milton Friedman. Even John F. Kennedy, while
employing numerous academic economists in his administration, saw fit only
to make Galbraith ambassador to India, a post Galbraith recalls as "an
often undemanding occupation".

A few years ago, Krugman wrote a pollyanna-ish piece on Enron for Fortune magazine, doubtless under the influence of the bright "new economy" moment that seemed
so promising before the Nasdaq crash - that, and the $50,000 fee that Enron
paid him for a bit of consulting. It's come back to bite him now, of course,
but it illustrates how "dismal scientists" can become a bit more optimistic
under the influence of "market forces" that aren't often discussed in economic
theory. Doubtless The Essential Galbraith has been edited to excise
similar failures of prognostication.

This does not, however, diminish the pleasures of the best of Galbraith's writing.
One essay, "The Proper Purpose of Economic Development", might be useful
reading for opponents on both sides of the recent, enraged protests over
globalization. If any recent economic skirmish has been so freighted with
conventional wisdoms, long past any ability to discern priorities or truth,
it has doubtless invoked globalization, that dismal palimpsest of fear
and hopeless jargon.